Taylor Flanagan News

Penfold Theatre Company celebrates its tenth anniversary at A Marvelous Party: Delovely, a fundraising gala on Sunday, April 29th.

THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING was a 1946 novel by Southern writer Carson McCullers. It took her five years to complete, although she did interrupt the writing for a few months to write the short novel The Ballad of the Sad Caf . The novel has been adapted for the stage, motion pictures, and television. McCullers herself adapted the novel for the Broadway stage in 1950. The film version followed in 1952 and a stage musical version, F. Jasmine Addams, was produced Off-Broadway in 1971. The work examines why people exclude others and the resulting consequences. The central figures also talk about how they wish the world was more fluid and changeable in terms of race, gender and identity, all of which runs thematically through McCullers body of work.

Different Stages opens its 2017 - 2018 season with Carson McCullers' beautiful adaptation of her novella The Member of the Wedding.

Different Stages opens its 2017 - 2018 season with Carson McCullers' beautiful adaptation of her novella The Member of the Wedding.

Something For Nothing Theatre Company has a reputation for performing little known Shakespearean works on a shoestring budget, this year it's TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, and it's brilliant.

You can count on an evening of Shakespeare that will be performed with expertise and ease. It's a worthy experiment in which to participate.

Now playing in Austin's oldest playhouse, The Scottish Rite Theater, THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR delights theatre goers with its gender-bending cast and lively performance. Austin's Scottish Rite Theater is a most appropriate venue for such a play to be presented, giving the audience a passage through time within the Masonic grand hall adorned with decorative antiques around the house. THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, written by none other than William Shakespeare, commands any space with a high level of detail, and Scottish Rite Theater fits the bill.  Given the historic nature of the theater itself, first opening in 1871 as a German Opera house, the play THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR was interestingly first published 269 years prior. The historic location introduces the audience immediately into another age and lends to the other worldly tone of the play's presentation. The experience within this show begins before the lights are up on the stage - a group of 'merry' players entertain the excited audience as they file in to find their seats. A bar, The Garter Inn, has an innkeeper polishing glassware as would any restauranteur on a Sunday afternoon. The mood is set well by The Weird Sisters Women's Theater Collective and when the curtain rises, the audience can disconnect and journey back into 15th century England.

Playwright Eva Suter has taken tropes from 70's sci-fi and plot elements from Shakespeare's Othello to create HOLD ME WELL. In her play, making it's World Premiere (outside of the UT production a few years back), Suter has crafted a dystopian tale of a desolate Central Texas inhabited solely by women after a catastrophic war has eradicated the male population and the Y chromosome. The threat of another war with an unseen and vaguely described outside force looms in the future as these five women struggle to save 'the stock' which is the future of humanity.

William Shakespeare's AS YOU LIKE IT, by Shrewd Productions and playing at Trinity Street Theatre is a blissful, flawless evening at the theatre.

Shrewd Productions is doing Shakespeare? Why now?

Shrewd Productions is doing Shakespeare? Why now?

DRACULA by Steven Dietz, adapted from the novel by Bram Stoker, produced by Different Stages and playing at The Vortex is pure ghoulish fun.

John Barrowman is a Scottish-American actor, singer, dancer, host and writer who has both British and American citizenship. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he immigrated to the United States with his family in 1975. His first big break was as Billy Crocker in Cole Porter's Anything Goes on London's West End. His most recent West End credit was in the 2009 production of La Cage aux Folles. To American audiences, he is primarily known for his TV work playing Captain Jack Harkness on Doctor Who and Torchwood. He is also openly gay.

Andrew Bovell's play, WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING, opens in Alice Springs, Australia in the year 2039. A fish falls from the sky and lands at the feet of Gabriel York. This is unusual because fish are extinct and this one still smells of the sea. It's been raining for days and Gabriel knows something is wrong. Fifty years earlier his grandfather, Henry Law had predicted that fish will fall from the sky heralding a great flood which will end life on earth as we know it.

Different Stages opens its 2014-2015 season with When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell. The story takes place between two worlds, between a prediction in 1959 and its outcome eighty years later, through the interconnected stories of two families over four generations.

Different Stages opens its 2014-2015 season with When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell. The story takes place between two worlds, between a prediction in 1959 and its outcome eighty years later, through the interconnected stories of two families over four generations.

Different Stages opens its 2014-2015 season with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Jay Presson Allen.

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE is a 1961 novel by Muriel Spark and a 1966 stage play, based on the novel, by Jay Presson Allen that was turned into a film in 1968. Miss Brodie, a teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, states her motto: 'I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.' Jean Brodie stands as one of theater's most charismatic warpers of young minds; a self-deluded Scottish schoolteacher and a passionate advocate of questionable causes (like Fascism) deemed by most to be subjects unsuitable for children in the 1930's. The story is part of a long line of books and movies about forward-thinking and eccentric teachers who have a great deal of influence on their students. Set against the backdrop of fascism and the Spanish Civil War, the story is told through a series of flashbacks.

The history of Peer Gynt is now almost as legendary and epic as the story itself. Henrik Ibsen based his epic piece of theater on the Norwegian fairytale of Per Gynt (Ibsen gives Per's first name an extra vowel), a young man who has a slew of misadventures involving trolls and other mythical creatures. Ibsen's theatrical interpretation of the fairytale is noted for its poetic style, blend of fantasy and reality, its disregard for the limitations of the stage, and its five hour length (hey, epics aren't short).

Last Act Theatre Company's production of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt is well underway, and BroadwayWorld Austin recently caught up with director Bridget Farias Gates, actor Andrew Bosworth, and music director Mario Silva to hear about this imaginative new production.